It’s a quirky summer comedy set during the summer of 1985 in Ocean City, Maryland. We all loved it. Well, one of the locations that is lovingly showed throughout the movie is a community center/arcade called The Fun Hub. It has air hockey, ping pong and a ton of video games. So, I think it’s time for one of my patented video arcade walk throughs, don’t you?

If you haven’t seen the movie, I urge you to watch it. It’s pretty great. Now check out the awesome, awesome arcade in which most of the movie is based, The Fun Hub.

Brad (nicknamed Rad) and his family arrive in Ocean City, MD for their summer vacation. While there, Rad walks into town and finds Anthony’s Beer & Wine. Here our hero, gets schooled in proper Icee pouring etiquette. Then he’s told about a door hidden in the alley behind Anthony’s.

That door leads to the Fun Hub.

Within the Fun Hub are games galore for all types. There are skill games like air hockey and ping pong as well as arcade games lining the blue cinder block walls. Let’s see how many games we can identify. I get lots of help from The International Arcade Museum.

As you can see in the establishing shot of Fun Hub above, our first games to see are the air hockey table on the right as well as this Super Chexx Hockey table from 1983. This game may look familiar as it was seen previously in the Golf n’ Stuff arcade in Karate Kid.

It’s not often I get to profile an actual arcade on Cavalcade Arcade, but that is my pleasure today. While you’ve probably seen and heard that both the Nerd Lunch and Atomic Geeks podcasts united in Chicago for C2E2, a few of us broke away from the convention nuttiness to live out a boyhood dream of playing in a dedicated video arcade. And one just happened to exist in the suburbs of Chicago. And it’s called the Galloping Ghost Arcade, reportedly the largest indoor video game arcade in America.

So, without further ado, here is a journal of my adventures with Jeeg and Christian traveling to outer Chicago to find the mythical Galloping Ghost Arcade.

The day started off with breakfast at McDonald’s, then Jeeg, Christian and I had to hightail it to Union Station to catch a train to Brookfield. We were cutting it close, but we made it. Here’s Jeeg running for the train.

Right off the train stop in Brookfield, there was this awesome little ice cream shop called Cock Robin. I was afraid to walk over to it because I didn’t want to ruin the illusion of a time warp to a 50s diner in perfect hibernation.

And after planes, trains and automobiles, we finally arrive. The Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, IL. HALL-LE-LU-JAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!

Walking through the door for the first time, you literally have to stand back for 5 minutes to even process everything that you’re looking at.

Then expect another 10-15 minutes just walking around open mouthed looking at the games. You’ll literally say over and over again in your head, “They have THAT?!” or “I haven’t seen that in YEARS!”

So you shamble over to the counter, pay a $15 cover and begin your own personal spirit walk. Everything is set to free play. No quarters. No tokens. Just bliss.

After taking stock of the situation, it was really hard to decide which game would come first. What should start off this massive orgy of electrical consumption? The arcade made that decision for us. Or at least, for Jeeg and me.

We had literally just done our Krull episode for Nerd Lunch and I discussed how 100% of my knowledge of that movie comes from this game. We had to play it. And play it we did.

That game was a fun blast from the past. And with that, the seal had been broken. Before we split up after playing this game, Jeeg and I stated that our goal before we left the arcade was to play each other in Karate Champ, a very favorite of both of us growing up. Making that pact, we split up and explored the wonders that lay within The Galloping Ghost.

This week we are down a CT so Jeeg and I invited our good friend and my Cult Film Club co-host Shawn Robare to sit in CT’s chair as his fill-in. With Shawn in place we got The Retroist to come back for his third appearance on the show. #HatTrick

With the Retroist on board we are discussing video arcades. We talk about our first experiences with arcades, we talk about our favorite arcade games, we even have lively discussions on Showbiz Pizza Place and the controversy surrounding Dig Dug and Mr Do! It’s a pretty fun discussion, won’t you join us?

Yesterday on Nerd Lunch Episode 118, we talked all about our favorite game shows. I love game shows. But I also love video games. So, obviously, I love when they combine the two.

To supplement yesterday’s podcast discussion, here are three video game based game shows that I loved watching when I was growing up.

Starcade (1982) – I loved this show. It was a quiz show with bonus rounds where players would get to play a few minutes on all types of upright arcade machines. Many of the machines were debuted on the show and there were several I never saw in a local arcade. You can find a ton of episodes all over YouTube. You can also find over 60 episodes streaming live on Starcade.tv.

Video Power (1990) – OMFG I loved this show and its host, Johnny Arcade (seen above right in his video enhancement chair). Check out the amazing Vanilla Ice-like rap by Johnny for the show’s intro. This show began, surprisingly, as not a game show at all but a cartoon variety show hosted by Johnny Arcade featuring action adventure cartoons starring characters from the games Arch Rivals, Wizards & Warriors, NARC and Bigfoot (the monster truck). However, for the second season the producers overhauled the format and created a game show, still hosted by the venerable Johnny Arcade. Contestants would answer trivia, play timed sessions on console video games (mostly NES stuff) and the winner would run through an obstacle course covered in velcro clothing sticking games to their bodies. This show was so incredible and simply reeks of 1990s awesomeness.

This week on the show CT abandons us so Jeeg and I invite The Retroist back for his second appearance and he brings along Vic Sage, one of the head writers on The Retroist blog, for his first appearance on the show. We bring in these retro experts to help us discuss one of the greatest gaming systems of all time, the Atari 2600 VCS.

I love video arcades. I always have. I also loved it when arcades popped up in movies. It was fun trying to pick out what games I could see and identify. So, I thought it would be a fun exercise to pick some of my favorite movies that have an arcade scene and do a “walk through” to see what games we could see. This should be interesting because video arcades during the the late 70s to mid 80s are ancient history. There’s nothing really like them anymore. These walk throughs should be nice snapshots of a moment in time at a video arcade during their hey day. So let’s begin.

One of my favorite movies from childhood is the 1980 screwball road race comedy Midnight Madness.

The movie stars David Naughton, Stephen Furst, Eddie Deezen, Debra Clinger and a very young Michael J Fox as a group of college students split up into colored teams (yellow, blue, green, red and white) who go out on an all night long clue hunt.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie is the arcade scene at a place called Pinball City. It’s here the characters play a game that I thought was fake, called Star Fire. I’ve talked about this scene before. You can watch that full scene here. Well, there’s a wealth of other awesomely vintage video games in that scene, so let’s start off this first walking tour with Pinball City from the movie Midnight Madness.

This movie was released in early 1980, which means it was probably filmed in mid-to-late 1979.

This is the clue the players receive for the arcade. It essentially is a word game that tells them to go to PIN + BALL + SIT + E, or Pinball City.

Here’s the entrance to Pinball City.

Here’s the adorable Debra Clinger checking out an Atari Football game which was produced in 1979. Behind her is a carnival shooter game called Shark Bait. However, I could find no information on that game anywhere. I can’t believe that this was created specifically for the movie to be used in a background shot when they didn’t even bother to do that for the Star Fire game.

In the background of this scene is a giant game called Indy 800. It was manufactured by Kee Games in 1975. The game cabinet was huge and took up 16 feet of space.

Here’s a very young Michael J Fox leaning up against a Death Race game. It was manufactured by Exidy in 1976. This game is based on and inspired by the movie Death Race 2000. There were only 500 or so made. When it came out it was banned in many cities due to its violent content.